the secret buried deep within the earth
by raindigo
Summary: An imagining of the lives of the children lost to the Athena Project.


1.

It begins like this:

The kind man in the dark suit wears a silver necktie pin off of which sunlight glares each time he shifts in his seat. Summer resonates through the cicada cries beyond the open sliding door, the quasi-silence modulated by the sound of zori tapping against the floorboards from where Seto, the orphanage's only boy, sits on the porch and swings his legs back and forth underneath him.

She is uncertain why she perceives her strange visitor as kind—as far as she is aware, crowfeet at the corners of his eyes and soft creases at the corners of his mouth when he smiles do not correlate to kindness. Neither is kindness quantifiable. But children are gullible in certain things and one of them is gut feeling: she knows that her days will amount to nothing if they are spent stowed away in an orphanage at the outskirts of a backwater town. Seto is older than her by a significant handful of years and is too unruly to attract the hospitality of any of the few couples who flit through this place. She is the second youngest resident, yet she can read more kanji than all of them combined, she understands what the adults whisper in the kitchen where they aren't allowed, and she wants so badly to _leave. _So when the man offers his hand, she takes it.

He never asks for her name.

She walks into the cleanest pristine building she has ever laid eyes on. The kind man welcomes her to what he calls the Settlement. She doesn't know she will never walk out.

She is the first one to arrive and the first one to depart; under very different circumstances, perhaps, but what she feels the day the doctors shut off the heart monitor and the flow of oxygen stills under the mask is the same as what she felt on that golden afternoon where cicadas sang and Seto's zori _tap-tap-_tapped against the dusty ground and she took the kind man's hand.

(He is not a kind man. Children are gullible. Gut feeling bears no empirical weight. Kindness is still not quantifiable—what would have changed, anyways, it if were?)

One dies in a sterilized room with white walls, white sheets, strangers in white lab coats and her fists clenched in her white hospital gown. What she felt that day she left the orphanage and her birth name behind and what she feels while she breathes her last is this: relief.

* * *

4.

He has orange hair. That's the first and lasting impression Four has on the other children, to his utter despair—not his ability to draw maps after a glance, not his prowess at mimicking the nurses' voices and gaits, not his astonishing dedication to remembering each and every single wrong committed against his person. And bringing it up whenever the occasion arises. Most of the others avoid him either because he has a short fuse or because he has a loud mouth coupled with the tendency to yammer off at a mile a minute. He is noise and color and bare feet stomping down the halls even as the rest grow weary, rising with the sun to rouse them out of slumber with a magnificent crash as he rolls over the edge of his bed onto the floor, without fail, morning after morning.

(He has tried to hold a conversation with Five. He gets all of three words in before a fork lodges itself an inch from his left foot's big toe. Five simply tosses her hair with a slight shake of the head, grabs Nine's fork, which he was in the process of using, and continues to eat without a care in the world. Four stops trying after that.)

Twelve and he get into trouble, once, for setting up a warzone in the dining area using toppled chairs and spoons bent out of shape and cubes of boiled carrot. (Yes, Twelve does comment on how his hair is the same color as their make-believe ammunition. He also mentions that Four's voice matches with both, which Four doesn't understand but thanks him for anyways, since it's meant as a compliment, right?)

They would have wrecked so much havoc, too, if he did not die a week later from an accidental overdose. A freshly-hired assistant apparently misplaced a needle during their routine injections.

Twelve does not tell anyone about the color of their voice after that.

* * *

17.

She is the tallest of them by at least a head, and the little ones climb her like a tree when the nurses are not looking. She wonders how they got here, why they would come here, if they know what it means to live here—she wonders how many more will follow before the monsters that herd them from experiment to aptitude test to health check-up will have eaten their fill. Her interaction with the subjects who are closer to her age are scarce; she prefers the untouched innocence of the children, who still have light in their eyes, to the abject resignation of her peers.

Some of them also creep her out—Five, in particular, who seems to think the daily evaluations they undergo are flighty games and competes to outstrip Nine, her eternal rival in chess and poker and shooter games and hanafuda and any number of insignificant things. Seventeen is the last of the second batch of orphans brought to the facility—Five is the oldest survivor of the first batch, now. Three finally succumbed to his umpteenth stroke a week prior, when the monsters decided it was no longer worth resuscitating him.

Perhaps Five has already gone mad. Perhaps she has always had a few screws loose, and that is why she was brought here. Maybe Seventeen is here because she's a bit crazy too, praying day after day for somebody to bust the doors down and let them out, out, _out. _She does not stop hoping,even when Sixteen is put down for trying to escape through the garbage chute, even when a nurse comforts her with the words, _If you want to see the sky, we can generate one in your room. _(Seventeen does not mention how the facilities have windows and if all she wants is to see, she can just fine from indoors.) Needles dig under her skin and pills trace a dry path from her throat to her stomach and she can now recite more decimals to pi than she has seen species of living plants or faces of living and dead people alike.

Seventeen watches over the younger ones, watches Twenty-One, then Twenty-Four, then Eighteen die as the monsters search for some secret buried deep within the earth. She knows it's contradictory to wish they never find it, never find the answer to this question stained in the blood of too many children: her release is only feasible if their research is as well. Still, she wishes for them to spend their years and money and efforts in vain, because she could not bear for them to win at the expense of them all.

(Ultimately, she follows in Sixteen's steps and manages to sneak into the trunk of a delivery truck. Unfortunately, she does not know about the chip rigged to blow buried between her ribs, the new preventive method the monsters devised after Sixteen's almost-successful attempt at escape. She does not know that, while wiping off her remains from the inside of the vehicle, a scientist will says, _This, however, is too cruel_, and his colleague will agree with a nod, hand clutched over her nose to block the stench of blood and gore. She does not know that the following week, the remaining children will have their chips removed. She does not remember how she arrived at Athena, why she would come here, what it means to live here. She does not know that her voice, crisp and unwavering as it recites bedtime stories and mathematical equations alike, is the brightest shade of green. But she knows, too well, what it means to die here.

Seventeen goes to sleep deep in the earth next to the secret the monsters search for and will never find, underneath a blue, blue sky, and this is a kind of freedom, too.)

* * *

13.

Thirteen manages a peaceful existence within the Settlement's walls. He picks up German, English, Italian and French by age six and learns to read Latin the following year. He is allowed his own library in his room, three dark wooden bookcases that match the frame of his bed, where he has a copy of Jules Verne's _Vingt mille lieues sous les mers _with a spine so worn it feels as though it would unravel under his fingertips. _Demian_ sits on his nightstand, its pages dog-eared and its soft cover rippled by a prominent water stain.

He is Nine's secondary chess opponent (due to Five's incessant requests for matches and then rematches) and literature buddy—together they go through _Iliad _and the Socratic dialogues. Thirteen introduces Nine to _Le Petit Prince _and Nine teaches him how to play a first-person shooter by ruthlessly crushing him during their initial matches. They make plans to delve into Greek mythology next.

After he dies, Twenty-Six moves into his room. The bookshelves are cleared and disposed of to make space for a grand piano and a violin stand. In the corner where his library once was, an elaborate system of monitors and laptops is setup, a labyrinth of cables tangling across the floor.

Nine keeps _Demian_ in the drawer of his desk—he retrieves it now and then to run his hands down the worn paper, over the black print, muddled beyond recognition at certain parts. When he leaves the facility, the book remains tucked between a laptop and a CD. Thirteen, Nine thinks, would have loved to see the world, as vast and diverse and unpredictable as he had imagined it to be.

* * *

5.

Five is brought to Athena and instantly makes it her home.

Victory is her modus operandi, her raison d'être, and she knows she's the best they've seen so far, by a long shot. (This is proven through a single fact: she survives). The aptitude tests are soon insufficient to satisfy the constant growth of her ambition, the thirst to surpass and subdue. She turns to the other subjects for entertainment; none of them qualify. Four is skilled at nothing noteworthy save getting on her every last nerve, Three is basically a husk that mechanically toils through its routine tasks, Two's development appears to be purely physical, and One is snuffed like a candle before Five has a chance to challenge her.

Two years after her arrival at the institution, she walks in on a game of chess between Thirteen and Nine. The common area is deserted except for them, crouched over the checkered board, exchanging idle banter in hushed voices. As she approaches, Five locates Twelve, curled under a blanket on the nearby carpet, and deftly sidesteps his sleeping form. She observes the two caught in their own world, unperturbed by the gain of an audience, and although Thirteen has remarkable strategy and originality, Nine is perpetually three steps ahead, bending the board to his will, the rules to his advantage.

Five is the best, thus logically she deserves but the best, so she feels no remorse when she slips into Nine's life and pushes Thirteen to the wayside. Nine meets her tooth for tooth and nail for nail, and she doesn't tire of him even when she wins—

(What aggravates her is how unshakeable Nine is, how grounded he is in himself, in his convictions, how he casts an electric hum through her bones whenever he reveals a facet of him Five has yet to discover but doesn't bat an eye when she usurps his winning streak or surpasses him in the evaluations or when, finally, her victories outnumber his.)

Five wonders how much she means to Nine. Wonders if she means anything at all. Then, one day, Nine says, _leave with us._

When they run away and she decides to stay, it's the first real choice she makes. And Nine is finally surprised.

She doesn't expect breaking Nine's immaculate composure to inspire disappointment in her. In the moment she spends surrounded, nearly engulfed, by flames, she realizes she has idealized Nine not because he genuinely interests her, but because she needs a goal to strive towards in order to survive. To continue surviving. The real Nine, however, is unapologetically human, driven by human emotions and aspirations and a sense of justice Five really doesn't give half a shit about.

The US government picks her up. She was growing bored with the institution's games anyways—it was clear that the Athena Plan was on the road to failure when she became its sole survivor. She holds no attachment towards transient things such as regimes or confinements such as country borders, so she boards a plane out of Japan without looking back. There is a vacancy within her she is frantic to quench, and with Nine gone, she finds herself suddenly purposeless.

She begins work at the FBI shortly after her body sheds its childlike appearance; she thinks of it as a stopgap measure, a placebo, an interlude until she finds Nine and shows him she did not need him to save her, after all.

When she is fourteen, the migraines begin.

Her world shifts dramatically from that point on: although she has outlived the project, although she has evolved beyond its walls into something greater, her life will always be dictated by their modulated drugs and experiments, a part of it uprooted and soiled and terminated before it is due. The realization washes over her, leaves her skin humid with cold sweat. _Memento mori. _She lost track of her inbuilt mortality, somewhere during her journey to hunt Nine down.

In the end, when she finally does meet him, she breaks protocol, dismisses orders, and shoots her companion when he tries to dissuade her.

Five dies by her own hand, not by her circumstances, and perhaps that too is a statement:

_Nine, I don't need you to save me. Live, instead. One of us has to._

* * *

12.

Twelve knows there is no such thing as a free meal.

When the man in the freshly pressed suit comes, moving so stiffly Twelve wonders if his joints have rusted under his skin, the children at the orphanage all gather at a reasonable distance, not completely out of sight, to observe their visitor. Being the perpetual odd one out, of course, Twelve stands right in the middle of the entrance hall, his bare feet planted firmly onto the wooden floorboards, immovable even as a caretaker tries to pull him away by his shirt collar. The strange man notices him and interviews him first. He shows a simple kind of fascination in Twelve's propensity for seeing sounds in color, if his banal inquiries—_what color is running water, what color is that child's voice, what color is a thunderstorm_—are indicative of anything. After he is dismissed, Twelve loiters near the sliding doors, and whenever a new kid prepares to enter the room, he drops a taunt meant to scare; the man is a monster, he eats children for lunch, he does experiments on human bones, nobody would care if you went missing.

Eventually, the caretaker catches wind of his mischief and escorts him to his room. The man in the suit, however, settles on Twelve as the ideal candidate and comes to fetch him after he has met with every other kid in the orphanage.

The man asks Twelve to come with him.

Twelve knows there is no such thing as a free meal. He leaves with the stranger anyways. He just wants to live, experience the world outside the cramped quarters he shares with four other boys, away from the fear of turning into an adult, still unwanted.

He goes because he wants to live.

(He discovers the meaning of irony when he steps into the Settlement and realizes the reason the strange man's voice is a stale, murky brown. They give him a number that isn't quite a name. The sounds he perceives in bright technicolor splashes, he learns, is the last thing the people in the white lab coats are interested in.)

Nine is the only constant throughout his life, dark and sharp and unwavering in his conviction to _get out_, so Twelve follows him. And even though childhood is something they both lost at the hands of monsters who were too ambitious, Nine believes in the goodness of humanity with what Twelve would label an almost childlike stubbornness, if he wasn't starkly aware of the reason they are both unable to be anything but hardened realists. When Sphinx is born, Twelve thinks he has finally found a direction in life, and it becomes exciting, borderline enjoyable, to play the daredevil as he toes the line between death and making-it-out-by-the-skin-of-his-teeth.

Years and years later, he meets Lisa. She is a muted, soft yellow, the promise of a safe place, belonging, the thought that maybe he can enjoy hearing in color again. When Five resurfaces from the cold, darker waters of their past, Twelve feels the world collapse around him.

There is no such thing as a free meal. He, of all people, should have known better than to expect normalcy. To be wanted, to belong, to be lov—

_Please don't go_, and he had never seen Nine beg, not even when they were escaping the Settlement and Five had refused to follow them, not even when the nightmares became too much and Nine couldn't get the image of needles and test tubes off the inside of his eyelids.

Twelve leaves.

He goes to the ferris wheel because he wants to live.

He goes to the ferris wheel because _Lisa must live_, and if not, then at least she would not die alone.

(But this, too, is cruel and selfish, at its core: he would be leaving Nine alone, Nine who has been his harbor, his lodestar, who gave new meaning to his existence, Nine who knows him better than anyone and everyone. Twelve has Lisa, but Nine has no one apart from Twelve.)

In the end, after the ferris wheel, after he sells out the blood of his blood and the bone of his bone, he goes after Nine.

(Nine has always been and will always be his partner. Twelve loves him, and he loves Lisa, and he knows in his heart of hearts that it _can't _be too much to ask for, to have them both, to stop being satisfied with the bare minimum necessary for survival and to thirst for _life_.)

He goes after Nine because he wants to live.

* * *

9.

It ends like this:

Twelve's body (deaddead_dead_) on the ground, red blooming from a rip in his shirt, a hole in the fabric of the universe, Nine's universe. Lisa is white as a sheet. Hospital sheets. Nondescript walls. Nine is going crazy. A scream rips from his throat, rips the air asunder, is that really him? Is that really Twelve on the ground? If Twelve is dead, then what? And what of hop—

It ends like this:

A detonator held in the air. A white flag; a war flag. A threat. A plea: _Remember us. Remember that we lived_.

But before that, there is this:

It is summer once again, the cicada's strident cries resonate through the palpable humidity thick like a second skin, and light flashes across his windowpane from the passing traffic.

(A year from now, Twelve will meet Mishima Lisa, and they will discover that trust is a thing that can be relearned.)

Nine thinks of Thirteen, thinks of Twenty-Six.

(He thinks of idle afternoons spent discovering faraway places in foreign tongues and a desire so desperate and humane in the depth of Thirteen's eyes Nine almost promised to save him. He thinks of music sounding off the non-descript white walls and a small girl dwarfed by the grand piano she tamed under her nimble fingers, how she had asked him if she would ever see a real concert hall; how he had been at a loss for words, unable to promise her anything.)

He thinks of Twelve, asleep in the room next to his.

(How he at least, at the very, very least, managed to save one of them. How Twelve continuously saves him in return. How Twelve is all he has now, but together, they could have the world. How they would give up the world to instill in it something it lacked. Something the Athena Project and the scientists and the drugs couldn't.)

He chooses a word.

* * *

_hope_.

Shibazaki lays the flowers down in front of the makeshift graves. Wood will rot and splinter and erode with time and exposure to the elements. Material is transient; memory is not. He promised them not to forget, to have their story told. How they held out for so long, he'll never know—how they never killed a single person and never let anger usurp their meticulous plans for truth and truth and nothing but the truth. He wishes them well, wherever they are in the afterlife. Wishes them the childhood they were deprived of and the future that was stolen from them.

(Miles away, a young girl lives on. She remembers. She keeps the smile like the sun on a hot summer day, with eyes like ice, stowed away inside her heart. Sometimes, it's all that matters. Most times, it's enough. She'll live for herself, now.)

Shibazaki lifts his head to the sky as a flock of crows take flight, and leaves.

The world brought them despair, and in retaliation, they have brought it hope. That is the sum of every marker carved into a wooden pike, every number trying to quantify a lifetime of losses and sacrifice. That is the secret buried deep within the earth that the monsters never found.

* * *

_Von._


End file.
